


A Ripple, Unending

by Erin_C



Category: Noein
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Yuletide New Year's Resolutions Challenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-01
Updated: 2014-04-01
Packaged: 2018-01-17 18:43:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,864
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1398490
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Erin_C/pseuds/Erin_C
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Haruka's battle has only begun.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Ripple, Unending

**Author's Note:**

  * For [imadra_blue](https://archiveofourown.org/users/imadra_blue/gifts).



Before the boundaries of flesh dropped away, she could not have realized how much power she would wield. Or how maintaining La’Cryma’s existence, observing all that made this dimension what it was, from the connections between its atoms to those among its people, would stretch that power to its breaking point.

The whisper came from beyond the borders of this reality: “You have to feel everything.” And she tried. The threads of her power fanned out to follow all the simultaneous individual decisions that wove the fabric of this world -- from the members of the ruling council, the Jyoukai, who let models and probabilities make dry-eyed choices for them, to the child who clung to her mother’s leg, sobbing because she was thirsty and the water hadn’t been turned on yet. She held them all, and though her reach stretched toward the infinite, it quivered with the strain. Because as much as their choices, she observed the hearts and minds of those who made them, and those were stretched beyond what they could bear.

But a few tethers held fast to her in turn.

Their grief and guilt, but most of all their love, were what led her back to them. That woke the part of her that had been a resident of Hakodate named Kaminogi Haruka.

 _No, no, I did this for you,_ she whispered, gathering them close as they suffered. She had no voice to speak with, now, but she held all of reality in her grasp. That had to count for something, didn’t it?

Her friends, without even knowing, taught her how best to hold them, the people of La’Cryma. She sang them into being, cradled their sorrows against herself and held their fleeting joys into the light, where they bloomed like torches against the endless black despair. She held them, and in return they sculpted her the arms to hold them with.

A few shrank from her, writhed away in agonized resistance no matter how gentle her touch. Only a few could do such a thing, as Dragon Knights with their own uncertain realities. They could not entirely resist her observation any more than she could stop observing them, but they could make a small, hard shell of themselves in the cupped hands of her power, collapsing like a neutron star in their shame, their rage, their desperate desire not to exist.

And one of these she clasped to her secret heart, weeping.

\----

The object of the training exercise should have been simple enough. In the containment of the arena, they were to explore the use of spin weaponry as shields like the ones manifested by Shangri’La’s destructons, and practice carving through those shields in turn. But Fukurou’s stomach soured against it the moment he saw it would begin with Karasu against Atori.

Kuina directed Atori to deploy his shield first -- he wasn’t a complete idiot, despite having the worst grasp of team dynamics of anyone Fukurou had served under. Atori climbed atop the first dais with spidery grace, and Karasu mounted the second with none of his usual guardedness. Fukurou felt Kosagi stiffen beside him.

Atori bent backward, and as the electrical field burst out from his spin weapon in a halo of light that prickled the hairs on the back of Fukurou’s neck, the black streamer that was Karasu streaked toward him.

The impact rocked the confines of the arena itself.

With the other Dragon Knights struggling to their feet around them, Kosagi and Fukurou helped each other up even as the energy spilloff threatened to batter them back down.

Fukurou twisted back toward the combatants, shielding his eyes. All he could make out was a black coil that spun itself to the point of an auger as it drilled into a ball of white-hot magnesium flame. Neither was remotely recognizable as human.

Tobi pushed his way through the crowd and grabbed Fukurou’s arm. “If Karasu makes it through the shield, the rotation will tear Atori apart!” he shouted.

“No,” Fukurou said, stomach dropping as he watched. “It’s himself he’s tearing apart.” The black auger jittered like a top that had fallen off its axis, shedding white sparks and streamers of black lightning. He shouldered forward, but Kuina heaved himself to his knees, a remote in hand.

“Never mind. I’ll shut them down. Brace yourselves!” When his thumb found the right button, the arena _throbbed_ , slamming them all against the ground, Kuina included. Like a dying star, the white-hot light guttered out.

As Fukurou clambered onto his knees and elbows, groaning, Atori’s cackles multiplied through the arena. His spindly form jerked upright over Karasu’s body like a grotesque puppet.

“Did you really, truly think you would get through?” His face split in a leer as he poked a toe at Karasu’s motionless form, then cocked back his heel for a far more vicious kick. “Die, you bastard!”

 _It’s not like he didn’t try_ , Fukurou thought grimly, and leapt toward Atori, who dodged his thrown fist serpentlike but couldn’t evade his second blow. --  not that the specifics mattered if it kept him off Karasu. Then it was Isuka’s meaty arm holding Fukurou back and Tobi latching onto Atori like a small dog onto a wayward child, and Kuina snarling at the lot of them as Karasu stirred and groaned. In the wake of awareness, his face slackened with despair -- until it caught the direction of Fukurou’s gaze and closed like a stone door falling shut.

Fukurou could’ve clocked him in the jaw, too.

\---

The incident sent Karasu, Atori, and no less than three trainees to the clinic. At irregular intervals, Atori’s giggles resounded eerily off the high walls, but Ai’s handmaidens pretended not to notice as they tended to the wounded. Fukurou wove a path around techs and equipment to Karasu’s bedside.

As if sensing Fukurou’s presence, his eyes flickered open, and for a long moment they just looked at each other, Karasu with that wary set to his jaw that spoke of how mulish he could get if Fukurou pushed him. Four years a Dragon Soldier, but underneath he was the same, stubborn Yuu.

“So, how soon are they going to get you out of here?”

Karasu shrugged, and winced at the motion. “No later than tonight.”

Fukurou wondered if it would be back to the barracks or a night in the isolation chamber. “Kuina have anything to say when he came by?”

“Just, ‘Save it for the battlefield, soldier.’”

Damn Kuina. Karasu would take that as a green light, and maybe that was Kuina’s intention -- he didn’t care about the source of Karasu’s rage if it got him results. Or maybe he just didn’t know what it was to walk down the street with a knife in his pocket, not caring what happened afterward as long he got his chance to gut the other guy.

Impossibly, in another lifetime, Yuu had saved Isami then. Fukurou had to believe he could do the same for Karasu now.

“Fukurou...”

“Yeah?”

“Did I get through?” Karasu’s eyes were anxious, fixed on his face.

Though he couldn’t have heard from across the room, Atori giggled again, a hideous sound cut short by soothing words from Tobi. Fukurou grimaced. “If you had, you would’ve killed Atori outright, or at least that’s what Tobi tells me. And then where would we be?”

That won an almost-smirk from Karasu, but his expression lapsed into dissatisfaction, his focus sinking inward.

Fukurou snapped his fingers. “Earth to Karasu. Didn’t you hear? That’s a GOOD thing.”

Karasu shrugged dully.

Leaning in, Fukurou grabbed Karasu by the shoulders, and that got his attention, blood-red eyes locked on the one he had left.

“We’re in this for the long haul, old friend. It’s not going to do anybody any good for you to go out in a blaze of glory, you hear me? Not you, not me, and not Haruka.”

At her name, Karasu’s eyes flashed, and for a second Fukurou thought he was going to fly off the bed at him, tubes and sensors be damned. Instead, his shoulders rose and fell underneath Fukurou’s hands in a long, shuddering breath, a motion that might have been distracting if the moment’s stakes weren’t so high.

“There is no long haul, just the next time we fight.” His voice sharpened to an edge of steel. “Now get the hell off me.”

One of the monitors began to beep angrily, and techs cocooned in glass and rubber shouldered Fukurou aside, cutting him off from his friend like a circle of Miho’s space aliens.

That’s how it always started. His parents, after the car crash. Suyoshi, in the upper strata’s makeshift clinic, when the wound in his leg went bad. He hoped it had been quicker for Fumiko. Here in the Dragon’s Lair, they could literally take you apart atom by atom and put you back together again, and still Karasu was bleeding out from some hidden wound that they would never see.

 _You see everything, Haruka,_ Fukurou thought. _How do I patch it?_

\----

“All you can do is keep an eye on him,” Ai had said, very reasonably, but Karasu made it harder than usual, locking himself in his room and then vanishing immediately after drill. Still, there were only so many places to go in the Dragon’s Lair, and Fukurou finally tracked him back to the arena. There, Karasu had asked Tobi to queue up a series of simulated force fields and was throwing himself against them, one after the other, his attacks sharp and erratic.

“It’s nothing out of the ordinary,” Tobi said when Fukurou cornered him on the observation deck. “Truthfully, all of our simulations are poor substitutes for a destructon force-field, but he wanted to test himself against the full range.”

His spin weapon gathering to a spear point, Karasu thrust himself into the flickering barrier, which shattered into quantum particles under his onslaught. With heaving shoulders, he waited for the next field to form, a flickering red and silver barrier that built itself in a spiraling lattice of energy. Fukurou had never seen this particular molecular pattern before, much less practiced against it, but it struck him as somehow familiar.

“Now what does this remind me of?” he muttered, frowning.

Tobi’s brows rose. “I’m impressed you recognize it. It’s based on the readings we’ve recorded just before the Ouroborous forms. Karasu was asking what we have on the Ouroborous itself, but to be honest, it isn’t much. The energy output is tremendous, but beyond that, it’s nothing our equipment or mathematical models can make sense of. If it could, maybe we could make predictions, but as it is we’re pretty much at the mercy of Shangri’La.”

“Ain’t that the truth.” Fukurou sighed. “Think it’ll ever be different?”

“Who can say?” Tobi said. “The Lady Amamiku is testing some theories, but so much depends on breakthroughs we haven’t made.”

Watching Karasu throw himself at barrier after barrier with increasing desperation, Fukurou wondered what it meant when you stopped trying.

\---

Strangely, it wasn’t the suffering that was hardest for Haruka to observe. Shangri’La’s advance made suffering inevitable. It was the malice and selfishness and simple distraction that spun so much suffering where it might not have been.

The Jyoukai fought desperately for the survival of La’Cryma, but governed its people like they were animals to be herded or capital to be managed. Decisions that might better their lives but did not wield a blade against Shangri’La quickly fell by the wayside. And as they honed each Dragon Knight to an ever-keener edge, they barely noticed as the spirit crumbled away inside the sword.

But of course it wasn’t just the Jyoukai. However orderly their suffering, the people of La’Cryma were people, and people found so many ways to hurt each other. The pain made it easier to strike someone smaller and harder to put out a hand, soften a word, offer a kindness. People formed factions, forced others to the margins. Among them, the odd predator roamed, taking what he wanted before the Dragon Knights took him down, because if everywhere he looked was hell, why not make his own hell a little sweeter?

Everyone had their reasons. She knew them all. How couldn’t she?

From beyond the borders of this reality came a different voice. “You begin to see,” it mocked, its tones strangely familiar. “It’s your seeing that’s the problem, isn’t it?”

“I can’t see the good without the bad, or the bad without the good,” she told the voice. “I can only see what is. So I see them for everything they are, as truly as I can, and the choices they might make to change things for the better.”

“Yes, you hold them so gently, not that they can feel it. You think _being seen_ makes some sort of difference to them?”

“When I was alive, it made a difference to me,” she said honestly.

“Oh, Haruka. But you’re _not_ ,” the voice said, almost sadly. “And for your loved ones, that makes all the difference.

“In the eyes of La’Cryma, Ai is Amamiku, the source of knowledge that will save them from Shangri’La, while on the inside, she begins to doubt everything. Miho, once so fascinated with worlds unseen, struggles to raise a child in an unseeing void with one friend fewer to shoulder the burden. Isami tries in vain to fill the vacuum you left, even as it eviscerates your beloved Yuu.

“You know this. You’ve seen it. Perhaps a part of you finds it flattering enough to make this burden bearable.” The voice turned ugly. “Knowing just how much you’re missed is a delicacy few others have tasted. Tell me, is it sweet?”

The lines of her power trembled. “No,” she said.

“Then end their pain, and yours. Let them fall peacefully into the dark.”

“That would end Ai’s vision for renewing La’Cryma. It would end Lily, and Miho’s joy in rediscovering the world through her eyes. It would end Isami’s smile and his strength. And it would end any chance for my poor, brave Yuu to find his way back again.”

“Those things mean nothing, next to the pain.”

“They mean everything.”

Grimly, the voice said, “We’ll see.”

\---

The klaxon sounded, announcing the formation of an Ouroborous. Fukurou stood across from Karasu on the transporter.

“Stay close,” he told Karasu. “Whatever comes, we’ll take it on together.” Because there was nothing more he could do for him now, he smiled. “Remember, I’ve got my eye on you.”

Karasu avoided his gaze.

The trapdoors opened, dropping them through quantum waves of light into the airspace over ruined Hakodate.

Acrid smog obscured much of the city, but not the three destructons that loomed underneath the red and silver arc of the Ouroborous. The first, unshielded one let out blasts from its eyes as it rolled toward the ground in a circle of destruction. _Where the hell is the ground team?_ Fukurou wondered as he and Karasu balanced themselves on the bubble-like shield of the second destructon.

On the ground, Isuka expanded into a giant of light, catching the falling war machine on his shoulders, but the destructon that Fukurou and Karasu rode pitched backward and cut off their view.

The banked power of Fukurou’s spin weapon rose within him, and he blasted downward as he ran. The shield flickered but did not break. Before him, Karasu ran onward and sprang into the air toward the third destructon. Praying that Isuka had already taken care of the first, Fukurou took off after him, but Karasu was too quick. He was already vaulting off the edge toward the rippling circle that marked the border into Shangri’La.

Baffled and furious, Fukurou realized that Karasu’s trajectory was taking him toward the apex of the Ouroborous.

\---

In the eternity between one moment and the next, Haruka saw it too. And though the shell he had made of himself still shut her out, she saw a flicker of the intention in his mind.

He reached for a place she could not predict or define. In her panic, Haruka strained toward that same place, for the source of the whispering voice that, when all this begun, had told her to feel everything.

“What will happen if he pierces the eye?”

“The gateway between this reality and the next is only that, a gateway. It establishes itself in the moment and cannot be destroyed,” it told her gently. “If he reaches the eye, he will shatter himself against it. If he does not, he will fall into Shangri’La and be engulfed by its forces.”

“Does it please you to define this reality, Haruka?” asked the other, mocking voice. “Does it satisfy you to know that you only see what is?”

She could no longer reach her Yuu, her Karasu. She could not even catch him when he inevitably fell. Her arms were stretched taut with all of reality, strained to the point of tearing her in half.

“You can stop this,” it said with horrible tenderness. “All you have to do is close your eyes and _let go_.”

“When I died,” she whispered, “he never looked away.”

The voice fell silent. The lines of her power sliced into her with the weight of what they held, as she had seen Yuu’s do to him.

Her conviction that every moment mattered threatened to shatter in her grasp, but she could not let it go. She had walked into the REIZU Simulator full of the life she had lived and without regret. Now, at her fingertips lay an eternity of moments, both hers and not. So many precious memories.

They had to count for something, didn’t they?

She reached out and gave them back.

\----

As fast as Fukurou warped forward through space, Karasu outpaced him. Fukurou wasn’t going to reach him in time. They were climbing too high, so close to the Ouroborous that it was already tearing strips from both of them. He called out, but Karasu gave no sign of hearing over the metallic throb of its rotation.

And then, in the eternity between one moment and the next, Fukurou _remembered_.

The chain of images began with the rough hands that held him as he screamed his first breath and built itself from there, a link at a time, exactly as he had lived it. It didn’t emphasize any one moment over another, but nonetheless, some stood out.

Scrambling up the jungle gym after his brother and sister. Suyoshi smashing his face into the carpet. Cutting up confetti with Fumiko for their father’s birthday party, and his booming laugh when they threw it in the air. Their mother showing them how to build apartment buildings out of dominos, and the towns that sprang up across the living room floor.

His first dressing-down from his first teacher. Arguing with Ai about the World Cup. Squirming in his seat, waiting for the bell to signal that it was time for soccer practice. Pelting across the grass until his sides screamed for mercy, leaving Yuu in his dust.

The call from the hospital that changed everything. The horror in Suyoshi's eyes and the resignation in Fumiko's as the doctor led them into the darkened room.

The way his grandmother’s house didn’t really seem to fit. The way his friends made a space for him that did. Ai sternly informing him that she wouldn’t go easy on him, then proving it by laughingly maneuvering the ball right out from under his nose. The long, silent afternoons Yuu spent watching him beat the crap out of videogame bosses. Miho's horrible stories about hauntings and alien abductions. The warmth of Haruka's smile, how she really _listened_ when you talked about stuff, whatever it was.

Suyoshi sobbing at their grandmother’s funeral. Everyone, including his siblings, dispersing to different schools and towns. The e-mails and chat sessions that helped make it suck a little less, at first.

His intensifying fantasies, full of long, lean bodies both male and female. His discomfort when he realized, on one of Yuu's trips home from Tokyo, just how long and lean he had grown. The crappy way he treated his friend, afterward. Ai’s wary expression when she passed him and his fellow self-proclaimed tough guys on the street, and his despairing realization that he’d let her slip through his fingers, too. His first clumsy experimentation with one of the assholes who ended up leaving him for dead.

But he didn't want to look too closely at his gang years, except the end of them -- the vision of Yuu that prompted him to save Ai, and himself in the bargain. Even through the cataclysm and all the losses came with it, that stayed with him -- a chain of offered hands, each pulling the next one back from the edge. That's all the security anyone had, in this world. And he damn well wasn't going to be the broken link.

It might have lasted a moment or, well, twenty-five years. As the cavalcade of images caught up with Fukurou’s present reality, they blurred and merged with his memories as they had been -- except one from their last year of grammar school that inexplicably remained hard-edged and immediate as a piece of glass clenched in his fist.

_Isami swung into the classroom just as Yuu snapped at Haruka, “She’s not gonna let me, so will you just cut it out already?”_

_Her mouth a thin line, Haruka stalked across the room to drop her bag on her desk._

_“Dude, what’s with you?” Isami asked Yuu, who was miserably trying not to look at her._

_“Nothing,” Yuu mumbled, and slouched further down into his seat, flicking his X-Acto knife in and out, in and out._

_When the bell chimed, Yuu slipped out faster than Isami could catch up with him, but he managed to grab hold of Haruka._

_“I asked him to come with my dad and me to Sapporo this weekend. Guess I pushed him too hard,” she said glumly, and looked at Isami. “You’ll go see him, though, right?”_

_“His mom probably won’t let me in,” Isami sighed. “What’s the big deal, anyway?”_

_Haruka looked uncomfortable. “I just... I really think he could use someone around.”._

_That evening, Isami shimmied up to Yuu's window via the downspout. The trick was to use the pipe mostly to keep himself upright while he hitched himself up on ridges in the siding. He'd learned that one the hard way. He tapped on the glass, and Yuu's head jerked up._

_"What are you doing here?" Yuu hissed, cracking the window._

_"I thought you could use a study buddy," Isami said._

_"Are you crazy?" He stepped aside to let Isami climb in. "My mom's gonna kill us both."_

_"Not if you keep your voice down."_

_Yuu plopped down at his desk. "I've got a ton of work to do, you know. I can't just sit around and read comic books."_

_"Well, maybe you can give me some pointers." He crept over to stand behind Yuu and recoiled. "Ugh, algebra. Impossible."_

_"You know, if you actually listened to Miss Yukie instead of just mooning over her all the time --"_

_"You'd look too if you didn't have such a boner for math."_

_"Yeah, you'd know about boners."_

_"Sh-shut up!"_

_As they bickered amiably under their breath, Isami noticed the angry red marks etched so evenly across the backs of Yuu's fingers. How'd that happen? he wondered. It made him uneasy. He stayed until Yuu climbed into bed, exhausted, and then crept out the window before dawn._

Karasu faltered in midair. And come hell or high water or fucking Shangri-La, Fukurou was going to reach him.

Letting the rotation of the Ouroborous pull him in, its arc guiding his flight, he bounded off each curve of energy thrown by the helix to where Karasu still struggled against the current. Once he had climbed to Karasu's height, he tore free of the whirlwind and arrowed toward him, aiming for his midsection.

The impact bent Karasu at the waist and flung them both outward. Limbs and cloaks tangled and tumbled past each other as the pull of the Ouroborous relinquished them to gravity’s inexorable grip. Fukurou had no wires as Karasu did, but he managed to snag his friend’s ankle as they plummeted.

Karasu flailed, unconscious, buffeted by wind, bleeding streams of REIZU across the sky. Teeth gritted, Fukurou dragged on him, pulling up, up, UP, DAMMIT.

The world flashed past at crazy angles. Endless rubble, red light on the sea. A destucton’s looming head as its shield flickered out. Trails of blue, a flash of white lightning.

The shockwave caught them with an impact that obliterated sound, but though Fukurou’s vision grayed and bled white, he did not let go.

\--

Blinking, Fukurou flung off bits of brick and struggled to stand in the shifting rubble. Dust and smog and REIZU particles veiled everything. He coughed weakly and flexed his empty hand, the motion sending daggers of pain up his arm.

“Karasu!” he called. Swiveling as he healed his torn shoulder, he homed in on the edge of cloak fluttering from behind a mangled streetcar.

Fukurou’s first full view of Karasu stopped him short, then launched him to his knees in the broken glass at his side, shoulder forgotten as he gathered all the REIZU his hands could hold and then pass on.

He’d seen Dragon Soldiers torn almost in half, but he hadn’t seen them live through it.

“C’mon, man, c’mon,” he repeated as he filled the gaping hole, praying he wasn’t just pouring water into a sieve. Karasu’s body held the blueprint, he was just supplying the bricks, he told himself, the way the previous Amamiku had explained when they were rookies drilling in field medicine.

Karasu’s lips parted on a gasp. Fukurou let out his breath but didn’t stop what he was doing. His hands channeled REIZU in a steady stream until the outer wall of Karasu’s body had reconstituted itself, in structure if not in detail. When he paused to send a distress signal to Tobi, Karasu’s hand shot out to grip his wrist.

“Leave it,” Karasu croaked.

“Like hell I will.” Fukurou yanked his hand away, sent the message, and hoisted Karasu up to lean against his shoulder. “They’ll be here soon.”

Bloodshot eyes rolled toward his. “I let you down. I let Haruka down.” His voice cracked.

“I’ll get my licks in later.” From this new angle, Karasu’s side struck him as pretty solid -- good enough until the other Dragon Knights got here, anyway -- but even through his shredded suit, he felt so damn cold.

“I’m not worth it. I never was,” Karasu mumbled into his shoulder. “Up there, I saw-- I saw--”

Fukurou frowned. “What did you see?” he asked, but Karasu did not answer.

“I’m not gonna lose you too, you hear me?” He shook him lightly, to no response, and the motion turned to rocking in his horror. “God damn it, I need you,” he said, and the other Dragon Knights were there, pulling Karasu out of his grasp and into the waiting arms of the techs.

This was how it always started.

\----

The part of her that was Kaminogi Haruka drifted, a tattered veil floating on a sea of moments. Horror and relief and exhaustion ate away at the filaments that held her together, now that she had so nearly proved herself unequal to the task of holding so many. Still, the part of her that had grown to encompass all had endured, and in that, she could take comfort.

Maybe the voice was right, and it didn't matter that she held them with love, so long as she went on holding them. What if that tenderness was more for her sake than theirs? There was no way of knowing. If she was to be worthy of the responsibility, it shouldn't matter one way or the other. But human observation measurably altered the movement of subatomic particles. Today, she had shown herself human enough to affect what was. That made her human enough to let everything slip through her grasp, if the fabric that held her together gave way.

She could not stay in control. She knew that now. The task she'd been given was too much for an individual personality with its particular human attachments. This world that she loved, and everyone in it, could not depend on her strength of will.

But for now, she was not so thin or tattered that she couldn't wrap herself around her broken one.

His cracked shell bled, and there was no telling what he would become when he emerged. But she pressed her lips to the gap and begged him not to give up.

\----

"They tell me he's going to pull through," Ai said.

Fukurou lifted his head, shoulders relaxing for the first time in hours. His own stint in the infirmary had been a blip, by comparison, though stretched by his acute awareness of the flurry of activity across the room. As the waiting dragged on in the hallway outside, the techs’ coming and going diminished, but he knew all too well how little that meant, in any direction.

"Just so you know, he's going straight into holding for at least a day until Kuina gets the full story -- or at minimum, something he can tell the Jyoukai."

Fukurou sighed. "Frankly, I'm glad that's all."

Ai shook her head. "You may be tools to them, but that doesn't mean you're easily replaceable." 

Across the hall, Tobi was quietly lecturing a distressed Atori, laying a hand on his arm. Over the past few hours, the tension had been high among the foot traffic outside the infirmary, with an unusual number of soldiers and medical personnel pulling each other aside for whispered conversations. Since the rest of the Knights had managed to repel Shangri'La's attack quickly enough that the average enlisted soldier didn't realize what had happened, Fukurou was pretty sure it had little to do with Karasu's actions or his injuries. "We're a bunch of tools, all right."

Ai smothered a laugh that would not have befit the Amamiku.

In his agitation, Atori shook Tobi off, letting loose with a stream of Atori-typical invective that rolled off Fukurou until he caught the words "deja vu" and "had to be some kind of trick." Ai caught his gaze.

"So it affected you too, even on the pipeline," she said quietly.

"Yeah." He studied her face, but it betrayed nothing. As she rose through the ranks of the REIZU Order, her expressions were becoming more and more muted, harder to read. Or maybe that was just since what happened to Haruka. "What do you make of it?"

"Except for a momentary increase of activity in the REIZU Simulator, our sensors detected nothing."

"So basically, nothing happened?"

"Or at least, nothing that hasn’t happened before." Ai shot him a crooked almost-smile, and he knew it had been the same for her.

\---

On the afternoon when Karasu was scheduled for release, the immobilization chamber stood dark and empty. Fukurou followed the faint sound of footsteps down the corridor.

As Fukurou fell in beside him, Karasu glanced up and then away. His movements were sharp, stiff. For a while, they walked without speaking.

His face a mask, Karasu asked, "How's your shoulder?"

"My shoulder?" Fukurou's brow furrowed. "Oh. Nah, that was nothing." He paused. "What about you?"

"Fine."

They passed a tech heading in the opposite direction, her footsteps on the floor the ticking of a metronome that faded to white noise. The hallway loomed in its emptiness.

"Can I ask what you were trying to accomplish up there?" Fukurou finally said.

Karasu's shoulders hunched underneath his cloak. "I was trying to shatter the Ouroborous."

After a speechless moment, Fukurou said, "Wow. No small plans."

Karasu shrugged stiffly. "It was foolish. As soon as I got close, I knew just how foolish it was. But going in, I thought, if I could just end this…" He trailed off, and when he began again, his voice was rough. "…then it would be worth it."

"I wish it was that simple."

"Yeah." He paused. "I'm sorry, Fukurou."

"Don't worry about it."

When they arrived at Karasu's room, Karasu looked around as if seeing it for the first time. Fukurou recalled the adage, "Today is the first day of the rest of your life." He’d never especially liked the phrase, but at the moment it seemed apt. Whatever Karasu’s opinions on the matter, Fukurou was glad his friend hadn’t run out of days.

He studied the square set of Karasu’s shoulder’s, the tightness of his jaw, the movement of his throat. Letting out a sigh, he turned to go.

“Fukurou.”

“Hm?”

“What you said, after I fell.”

Fukurou winced. He’d said a lot of stuff, hadn’t he?

“What did you mean by it?”

The words were quiet, uninflected, and Fukurou couldn’t get a thing from them. He smiled at Karasu over his shoulder. “Nothing you don’t want it to mean.”

As he reached for the door control, Karasu grabbed his wrist. The next moment, Fukurou had him up against the wall, mouth crushed against his.

Panting, Fukurou broke the kiss and pulled back a few centimeters to gauge whether he’d misread. But Karasu’s eyes were hooded, his breathing heavy, and his hips shifted to accommodate the angle of Fukurou’s against his. That was all the encouragement Fukurou needed.

When they made it to the bed, Fukurou was too eager to resume the delicious contact to bother getting their cloaks out of the way. He welcomed the friction that leverage brought as he pinned Karasu to the mattress, feverishly grinding against him, drawing groans from both their throats.

He wished they’d done this years ago. Of course, that was impossible. He’d been in denial and pissed at the world, and Yuu had been deliriously in love with Haruka -- though Fukurou had a feeling that if anyone could have understood, it would’ve been her.

A lifetime had passed between then and now. They scraped out a living in a junkyard of broken dreams. But maybe, down here in the rubble, they could dig out a space for themselves. Just Fukurou and Karasu.

Afterward, they drowsed, Fukurou’s arm hugging Karasu’s back against his chest.

“Up there,” Fukurou said sleepily. “What did you see?”

Karasu tensed, and Fukurou wished he knew when to shut the hell up. But finally, Karasu said, “Everything I took for granted.”

Fukurou gave his shoulder a squeeze.

\----

Their every touch, every caress, was a balm. Even as the part of her that was Kaminogi Haruka dissipated across the waters, blended with the larger whole, that sense of connection rippled outward in observation that went beyond sight or hearing, encompassing all of reality in an endless chain of linked hands, a circle of souls. Beyond anything else, that was what she most longed for -- for Yuu, for Isami, for Miho and Lily and Ai. For everyone.

She shaped it with her palms, traced its contours in their hearts. But in the end, to bring it forth most truly, she had no hands but theirs.


End file.
